For her house inclineth unto death!-The
Bible.
We lie beneath the mosquito net, we
undress behind the purdah, we sit on the verandah,
or stroll in the compound; we dance, we ride, we eat,
we sleep, ever heedless of the eyes watching, and of
the hidden form; but above all of that relentless
will which causes some of us uncontrollably to do
odd things at odd moments under the Indian stars,
to our subsequent disgust and wonderment.
Leonie, with Jan Cuxson behind her,
stopped outside the temple door, which, hanging upon
one hinge, moved slowly to and fro in the night breeze.
And at the side of the altar, in the
black shadows of the doorway which led to the secret
places of the temple, a pock-marked native woman,
draped in an orange coloured sari embroidered
in silver, laid one hand upon the priest’s arm
and pointed with the other.
“Behold the Sahib,” she
whispered with a snarl of hate at the corners of her
mouth, stained crimson with betel juice. “He
who seeks her in wife,” she continued, pushing
the sari back from about her head so that the
thirteen silver rings she wore in her crumpled left
ear tinkled faintly, and her nose-ring of gold set
with small but real turquoise gleamed dully, “and
once wedded she will return across the Black Water.
O father of the people, O wise one, I love her and
thou didst promise.”
She suddenly beat her breast, and
the heavy silver bracelets jingled faintly, then shrank
back against the painted wall as a young man, even
the jungle guide, and beautiful to the verge of unseemliness,
stealing from the shadows, smote her fiercely across
the mouth, and pulled the sari roughly over
her head.
“Hold thy peace and watch,”
he whispered, with a swift movement of the arm, most
suggestive of a cobra uncoiling itself with intent
to strike, as Leonie turned away from the doorway
with a shudder.
She took two steps and stopped irresolute,
with the rays of the full moon shining upon her upturned
perplexed face.
Then she stared down at the myriad
things which crawled and hopped in and out of the
gleaming bones which lay about in little heaps, or
scattered in ones and twos, even up to the door and
into the dim interior.
Too absorbed, neither Jan nor Leonie
noticed the murmur of voices from the far end of the
court, nor the reek of the tiger’s blood which
came from her stained dress and the carcase of the
dead beast which was in the process of being skinned,
and around which hovered the native staff awaiting
the distribution of the coveted tiger’s fat.
Which more by faith, than any medicinal
property it contains, is supposed to work miracles
in stressful times of rheumatism, and cattle sickness.
Jan Cuxson, trying to grasp and knot
together the tag ends of a dawning knowledge, stood
behind his beloved, patiently awaiting her next desire,
instead of picking her up in his arms as he should
have done, and carrying her off to safety, a good
wash and a better dinner at the other end of the court.
He was surprised when she spoke quickly
and below her breath.
“Take me away,” she whispered
hoarsely as he caught her outstretched hands and pulled
her fiercely into his arms. “Take me away,
the place is evil-evil I tell you-and”-she
raised her hand and passed it across his face, laughing
softly, “I think I am bewitched-something
is--is--pulling--is------”
She looked back over her shoulder,
stared hard for a moment, and then, tearing herself
free, ran like a hunted deer through the crumbling
doorway into the blackness of the temple.
“Who fears, O Woman?”
whispered the man, whose beauty touched the unseemly
as he sank to the ground. “Who fears?”
Half-way up the temple Leonie stopped,
standing in a silver pool of moonshine which blazed
like the blade of a knife through a hole in the roof;
lighting up the ruined altar, the grass-grown stones,
and the image of a female deity carved in bas-relief
upon a huge block of granite.
Nude was the woman carved out of stone,
and of so dark a blue as to be almost black; with
tongue protruding and hair in waving masses, through
which were thrust four arms; garlanded with skulls
she danced wantonly upon the body of a man, with two
hands raised in blessing, in the third a knife, in
the fourth a bleeding head.
Kali! Kali! Kali!
If only Jan Cuxson had been able to
do something, anything, what a mint of trouble he
would have saved himself and others, but instead, he
stood rooted to a spot just inside the door, incapable
of moving hand or foot, held by a force he did not
even guess at, and therefore could not fight, watching
Leonie as she moved slowly forward, as though she
were walking in her sleep towards the blood-stained
altar.
“So will she always come,”
murmured the old priest as he laid his hand caressingly
upon his well-beloved pupil. “So will she
always come. Love? Pah! who fears the love
of man in the Black One’s temple? Who?”
And there was no answer from the shrouded future.
Leonie stood still, quite still, unconscious
of the eyes about her, and everything save the terrible
problem she was trying to solve.
Then suddenly she cried aloud, and
the words, like wings, beat against the roof and walls.
“I know!” she cried, “I know!
I know!”
And whirling round towards the spell-bound
man, she turned her hands, palm downwards, with a
wonderful eastern gesture of renunciation, and crumpled
into a heap before the altar, and the three watching
figures stole noiselessly back into the secret places
of the temple as Cuxson, freed, strode hastily up
to his beloved.
He gathered up the unconscious girl
as tenderly as a woman, oh! a good deal more so, and
turning her face to his shoulder, carried her out of
the temple; stopping for a second to hold her more
securely in his left arm as he bent to pick up something
which glittered in the moonlight: a piece of
orange silk heavily embroidered in silver, for which
Leonie had ransacked the Old, the New, and the Lal
Bazaars; a bit of her ayah’s sari torn
and caught in a sundri breather. “And she
stayed behind on the boat,” said Jan to himself,
with a flash of inspiration as he turned the thing
over in his hand, and slipped it into his pocket.
And though his heart ached over his
beloved’s mental and physical distress, he inwardly
rejoiced at the untoward occurrences of the day which
had supplied his solid, trustworthy brain with the
outline of a key to the problem.
Dear, stolid old Jan, who, given the
time, could beat anyone at unravelling the hardest,
hard-tied, knotted problem.
With a tale of sudden faintness he
gave her into the care of Edna Talbot, who cooed and
fluttered over her like the woman she was, in spite
of her workmanlike appearance and her outrageous craving
for a big meal. And she herded the sahibs to
the far end of the court, where lay the sick man,
after the big meal in which Leonie had joined right
heartily; a little white about the face, truly, and
shadowed about the eyes, but normal and content, with
not the vaguest recollection of what had happened
after the killing of the tiger.
“Oh! don’t be dense,”
Edna Talbot said quite brusquely when Guy Dean, having
brutally ignored the suffering native, suggested returning
to the others. “You surely don’t
want to make a triangle.”
“Triangle-what!”
“Well, you know the old saying about two being
company, don’t you?”
“Of course I do-that’s
where it comes in,” replied the lad not over
lucidly, “I want to make the two!”
The major laughed at the rueful countenance,
as he clapped the boy on the shoulder.
“You’ll get over it all
right, old fellow; it’s just like inoculation,
a feeble taste of something which might have been ever
so much worse. Trust me, you’ll get over
it!”
“Never!” stoutly
maintained young Dean as he heaved a stone at something
which fled across the court, his mental vision failing
to register a picture of the future in which Jill
Wetherbourne, daughter of Molly and Jack, occupied
the principal position.
Later, Leonie, sitting with Jan Cuxson
on a block of fallen masonry, smiled sweetly upon
the head shikari, who, salaaming, prayed her
to honour him by accepting a little memento of the
shikar which had terminated so successfully
upon the slaying of the tiger.
In his open palm he held two small
bones about two and a half inches in length, two little
superstitious tokens which ensure sons to the woman
who treasures them, and which, he told her in his broken
English, were only found in the tiger, one on each
side of the chest, unconnected with any other bone
at all.
“It is a charm, O! Mem
Sahib, defender of the poor, which will assuredly
bring you happiness.
“And may the sons of the sahib
grow straight as the pine tree,” he added slowly
in his own tongue, as he felt the sahib’s eyes
fixed steadily upon him.
“What did he say to you, Jan?”
As the shikari turned away Cuxson
caught the girl’s hands and crushed them up
against his heart.
“I will tell you some day!”
“Tell me now!”
“No! not now! It is of
love that I should have to speak, and in all these
past weeks you have not let me touch your hand or speak
to you of love. You have put a barrier between
us, a barrier of a misplaced fear, which has grown
higher and stronger since I have had to confess to
failure in finding any trace of your old servant.
India is wide, dear, and its villages uncountable,
and I am not distressed over the empty return
of these last months; all that worries me is, that
while prowling about the Himalayas out of reach of
the post, I never knew what had happened to you, or
that you were in India.”
Leonie sighed as she opened her hand and looked at
the small bones.
“Tell me now, Jan!” she insisted.
“No! Leonie, I cannot.
There will be no one near us when I do tell you,
and except as a souvenir of that very fine old man,
you need not keep them, because my love is a still
greater and surer charm to bring you the great happiness
they promise.”